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Originally Posted by larsdangly
The question of whether an illusion of fairness or actual fairness is best, and what fairness means, is very much a table-to-table issue. My personal preference is in absolute fairness and transparency when it comes to die rolls, application of settled 'case law', etc., and complete and radical, 'the universe doesn't care if you live or die' unfairness when it comes to the nature and powers of the beings and hazards the PC's might find in the world. I'm sufficiently anarchic in this respect that in recent memory I ran a mostly 1st level D+D party through Tomb of Horrors simply because they ran across it in the place I'd left it while they were hex crawling and they thought it looked like an interesting place to poke around in. Similarly, my main LE TFT sandbox setting is replete with 14 hex dragons, powerful liches and so forth, and I just assume it is the job of a 32 point character to sort out for his or herself where the line between 'fun' and 'dead' can be found.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Skarg
Ah! Something we very much agree on! Yay!
Except for the transparent die-rolls. I prefer the GM to hide most of their rolls, to reduce the amount of artificial out-of-character knowledge the players get about things.
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Definitely a valid approach and I agree that if the PCs insist on going into places they ought not to go, they should (and will) end up confronting unbeatable foes. But NPCs, rumors, etc. will generally discourage moves like that and the players have learned caution over time. 1st level groups entering the Tomb of Horrors / Annihilation doesn't generally happen in my stories.
GMs just make stuff up anyway, so the availability of rumors, helpful NPCs, research material, etc. is completely arbitrary -- different people have radically different ideas of what "makes sense". So even among tables where potential danger might be theoretically high the average PC lifespan in sessions will still very much depend on the GM's "whim".